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Arabic Projects Ideas 2: Open Arabic Fonts

If you build Arabic website you must be hit by the hard reality, Arabic web font options are really narrow, the only realistic choices are:

Tahoma: only good for small sizes.

Arabic Transparent

Traditional Arabic

My idea is to buy other quality Arabic fonts and ask browser/OS vendors to include them, we really need more choice to improve the quality of website productions, and add more creativity to our Arabic Internet.

i may find ways to convince some designer to start work on that, as a start: what are the guidlines to build the “standard” font in order that vendors accept it? (i prefer the answer will be in a one-to-one meeting 🙂 )..

btw, i tried the above poste font on mac, it work perfect! thanks allot Jerais and thanks to KACST ppl..

Things are getting hot on the Arabic fonts front with typekit:”Now, most major browsers—including the latest versions of Internet Explorer, Firefox, Safari, Chrome, and Opera—recognize a CSS rule known as @font-face. What that means, in brief, is that Web developers can now easily embed downloadable fonts in their pages. To see an example, load up Firefox 3.5 or Safari 4 and check out this site. You’ll see three new typefaces—Liza, Auto, and Dolly—used in the body text and headlines. If you don’t have one of those browsers, you can check out the screenshots below.

The @font-face CSS rule in action (top) vs. a Web page without @font-face support (bottom). Click image to expand.The @font-face CSS rule in action (top) vs. a Web page without @font-face support (bottom)If you didn’t jump out of your chair and run around the block, you’re probably not that into typography. But trust me—that page is revolutionary. While certain browsers allowed font embedding before, there’s never been a standard implementation that worked across the entire Web. As a result, Web designers have always been restricted to using the few fonts that they know were already installed on most people’s computers. That’s why most pages reach for Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, Georgia, and Times New Roman, the fonts that ship with the Windows or Mac operating systems. With @font-face, we’ll finally see custom fonts on the Web—fonts designed to convey a specific tone or emotion, to create distinctive publications or styles, just like in print. Joshua Darden, a type designer and professor at the Parsons School of Design, likens the change to the invention of color photography. The Web, he says, has long been stuck in black and white. “It’s going to be a real jump forward to finally see real fonts online.”

Thank you Samer for these information.
But which site you are talking about I could see the link, could you resubmit it again.
Although @font-face will open many new doors, it still not as easy and consistent as installed fonts, one issue I can think of is the download size of these fonts, quality fonts could exceed 2MB in size.